About me

Looking back, I can see how it all comes together. I've been fascinated by creation and guided by curiosity my whole life, and I learned just about everything I know by doing. That comes from my father. In post-Soviet Moldova he adapted his position in life to yield his desired outcome. He wanted his kids to do well in school, so he became a teacher. He wanted the neighborhood youth to grow up in a safe environment, so he opened a disco club and kept all of us under his watch. When my grandfather retired and the family needed money, he opened a workshop repairing car bumpers, and staffed it with my grandfather, my cousin, and his friend. Different trades, one goal: put the people around him in an environment where they could grow because that was his true goal. My father showed me that if I wanted something, I could figure it out and get it somehow, some way.

I try to live the same way today. Wherever I am, I do and learn whatever the desired outcome requires, and I'm acutely aware that my own well-being depends on the well-being of the people around me, at work, in the neighborhood, in my family, even in my country. I want to enjoy life to the fullest, and I want my work to leave the world better than I found it.

In my youth I was already demonstrating this pattern, albeit, for selfish reasons at first. For example, I wanted to read the next chapter of manga nobody had translated, so I learned English by translating it myself. I wanted a PC that could run the big games, so I became the guy who walked neighbors through computer shops, and the fees became parts for my own build. I wanted our youth NGO's programs to exist, so I became the designer who made the posters, the cards, the websites. And when a friend and I opened a workshop turning scrapyard finds into furniture, I became the rest of it too: the engineering, the marketing, the photography, the taxes. We took second place in Romania's national furniture design contest and still ran out of runway. Those were the fun days.

The workshop, photo studio includedThe catalog, shot and designed in-houseIndustrialConceptArtDarker than Orange, pistons for legsA lamp wound from jute

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This is how Design became the career. Amazon in Romania first, then I left for Munich, Germany, where I was Userlane's first marketing designer and then its first product designer as the company grew from fifteen people to seventy. In 2022 I became Ledgy's first product designer. I built the design system, hired the team, and learned equity, vesting, and financial reporting from zero. I've designed nearly everything Ledgy ships, and lately the part I care about most: the customer-facing AI agent's identity, activity, and approvals, the surfaces that decide whether people trust it.

Munich also gave me my family. I met Jennifer at Userlane; we got married at a beautiful UNESCO church, with Dusty, the dog we drove a thousand kilometers to bring home during Covid. Then came Sofia, then shortly after, Felix. I think about when I was five, I waited for a new Lego set every time my father traveled, and I'm still planning the robot kits we could never afford back then, but now with my son. Building a family is the most meaningful, most ambitious project I'll ever run, and I recommend it, with the honest warning that once kids arrive every remaining hour is spoken for.

Munich, where it all startedOur wedding day, Dusty includedJust marriedThe usual passengersThe four of us

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That's where everything converges. Buna started with the overwhelm of planning food for four on different eating schedules, food preferences, and operating on minimal sleep: Jennifer and I gave our agent a place to keep our recipes and our household's context, who likes what, who eats when, who's on a diet. It helped enough that we're open-sourcing it for other parents. The same setup writes Sofia personalized bedtime stories with her as the main character. My father's businesses, my NGO, now a cooking app for families and their agents: the same move each time, pointed at the people it's for. And Buna was, more than anything, a learning experience. There's much more to come, and I'm looking forward to building the next thing, whatever makes the world of the future a beautiful one.

You can find me on X, GitHub, and LinkedIn, or reach me at ion.mesca@gmail.com.